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Book Review: The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton

The Booker Award winner for 2013 – which made Catton the youngest ever writer to win a Booker. So what’s The Luminaries all about? What makes it special? At the heart of it, the novel is a mystery. However a mystery woven with such magic and spun into an entangled web so beautifully that the eight hundred plus pages just turn themselves. It is 1866 in New Zealand. Hokitika is the latest gold rush town. After a few strange happenings in the town, twelve men gather to discuss. Each of them has a part of the puzzle. And then the story takes off, the incidents get more and more bizarre and the mystery deeper and murkier. Catton does a great job in engaging the reader, challenging her to speculate, guess, get perplexed but continue reading. The pace is good and the interest consistent. When all is revealed at the end, in a few quick chapters on actual sequence of event, and it turns out to be a fairly simple story – you realize the masterfulness of the writer in managing to engage you for so long. So what does Catton excel in – what got her the Booker. I don’t think it’s capturing the 19th century New Zealand (though she does a decent job doing that) or that the story is extraordinary. For me, it is the way she spins the yarn and the characterizations. She digs deep into each character (and the hook has a dozen and a half of them). Each of the characters is presented in such subtle detail that he or she comes to life – distinguished and polished. Sample this: “For Gascoigne was extraordinarily moody. The wave of compassion that had compelled him to lie on Anna’s behalf dissipated almost as soon as the whore was freed: it darkened to despair that his help might, after all, have been a vain one – misplaced, wrong, and worst of all, self serving. Selfishness was Gascoigne’s deepest fear. He loathed all signs of it in himself, quite as a competitive man loathes all traces of weakness that might keep him from his selfish goal. This was a feature of his personality of which he was extraordinarily proud, however, and about which he loved to moralize. Whenever the irrationality of all this became too evident to ignore, he would fall into a very selfish bout of irritation.” See the fine etching of the character there. And he is not even the primary character. The end is a little disappointing, a couple of sequences appear too convenient and not all is explained. Don’t know if the book deserved a Booker or not but it’s a compelling read. Enjoy the journey.